Abstract
According to the Author, the prevailing modalities for explaining social morality in current sociologies reflect the cultural and structural dualisms of modern Western society (based on the individual/state, private/public, micro/macro axes) and their compromises. The theory of ‘institutionalised individualism’ is intended to grasp the distinctive trait of the dominant morality, which today faces a profound crisis. This chapter argues that, with globalisation, new processes generating moral norms are emerging that, alongside sequential and concomitant forms typical of modern morality, represent a transmodern form of normative morphogenesis (normogenesis) that the Author calls ‘relational’. Relational morality is characterised by the fact that moral norms must respond to new needs in the ways in which human beings relate to each other and with nature. This ‘relational normativity’ asserts itself wherever social relations are considered as a reality endowed with sui generis qualities and causal properties, thus becoming the foundational moral criterion of new social practices.
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Notes
- 1.
H. Arendt (1958) delineated the historical development of this social sphere distinct from the private sphere and from the public sphere, starting in classical Greece, judging it negatively (which I do not share).
- 2.
Ismael Al-Amoudi (2014) has proposed the interesting distinction between sequential morphogenesis (which consists in the displacement of one institution by the next) and concomitant morphogenesis (which consists in the multiplication of concomitant institutions, without necessarily entailing the disappearance of earlier ones).
- 3.
- 4.
Stetsenko and Arievitch (2004).
- 5.
Porpora (1987).
- 6.
Luhmann defines morality as a special form of communication that carries with it indications of approval or disapproval. “The moral is not something good. Of course, that should not lead us to say that the moral is something bad. […] The moral functions only as a distinction” (Luhmann 1993: 996). Trust itself, which for Parsons arose from the normative order of the open society, in Luhmann can no longer count on norms that disappear and must be entrusted to communication (Jalava 2003).
- 7.
See Donati (2011: 221–315).
- 8.
- 9.
On the empirical plane, it is a matter of knowing the size of groups that adopt each adaptive modality, their structural characteristics (age, gender, socio-economic status, etc.), and their power relations.
- 10.
‘Logic’ here means principles, or rules, of reasoning.
- 11.
As I have asserted in previous papers (e.g. Donati 2014a, 2015a), properly speaking, ‘logic’, in its classical (Aristotelian) sense, is the set of rules (normativity) used to achieve valid knowledge. By extension, I understand logic as the set of rules that connect – in various ways – the components of any social relation (its goal, means, value-pattern). Knowledge is a particular social relation, one that connects the knower with the object to be known.
- 12.
As Elisabeth Bott has demonstrated, the connectedness or the density of a husband’s and wife’s separate social networks is positively associated with marital role segregation, and vice versa.
- 13.
- 14.
I call Luhmann’s theory ‘a-relational’ not because he ignores the relation – indeed, it permeates his thinking – but because he refuses to base sociology on the social relation. Specifically, it is a-relational for two reasons. The first is that he uses a binary code, which is notoriously ill adapted to deal with relations: “Communication is correspondingly coded as a (positively or negatively interpreted) proposal of meaning, which can be understood or not understood, accepted or rejected. The control of this doubling and especially this negativity of not understanding or rejecting unfolds recursively and thus already determines the selection of the proposal – whether the proposal aims at agreement or conflict. Thus a knowledge of how to estimate what can be understood emerges” (Luhmann 1995: 445). The second reason is that the system as such (specifically: biological, psychic, and social) is for him immune to the social relations of the living world. I am perfectly aware, instead, that Luhmann uses the concept of relation in a logical (cybernetic) sense to the point of theorising a sort of ontological and epistemological relationism.
- 15.
According to Luhmann (1996), morality is becoming a self-referential system that is specialised in responding to the problem of esteem and lack of esteem in communication. He defines morality as an ability to sustain the self-referential reproduction of communication: “Neither life as such, nor the functions of the brain, nor the conscious operations of perception and thinking have intrinsic moral quality. […] The moral makes an important difference only in communication, namely, a difference in the communicative reaction to the expression of esteem or disesteem. […] There are, in other words, no good people or bad people, but only the possibility of indicating people as good or bad” (Luhmann 1993: 1000). To him, recourse to the ‘normativity of norms’ or to ‘values’ proves to be untenable because all norms and values reveal themselves to be undecidable (Luhmann 2008b).
- 16.
- 17.
The international film festival aimed at adolescents held in Griffoni (Italy) adopted as its motto, ‘Be different’, which clearly indicated a moral imperative aimed at the young people.
- 18.
This study investigates the influence of relationship density and relationship power on moral reasoning. Findings show that social network properties influence moral reasoning by creating similarity within groups. No support was found for the influence of informal leaders or of group development.
- 19.
‘Moral Atrophy in the Welfare State’ (Robert E. Goodin, in Policy Science, 26, 1993, pp. 63–78). ‘Moral Inferiority of the Welfare State’ (by Rev. Robert Sirico, Acton Institute); ‘The Rise of Government and the Decline of Morality: the growth of government has politicized life and weakened the nation’s moral fabric’ (by James A. Dorn, Cato Institute, 1996); ‘How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden’ (Mises Daily: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 by Per Bylund).
- 20.
Zijderveld’s favourable assessment of the morality of welfare in the United States is merely comparative. His affirmation that the welfare state in the U.S. is more moral is not meant to imply that it is always ethical, but merely that in the U.S. debate regarding the ethical criteria of welfare is more explicit and carries more weight than in other countries. For further evidence of Zijderveld’s comparative claim, see Mead (1986).
- 21.
As an example, we can refer to the open method of coordination (OMC) adopted by the European Union. The OMC provides a new framework for cooperation between the Member States, whose national policies can thus be directed towards certain common objectives. Under this intergovernmental method, the Member States are evaluated by one another (peer pressure), with the Commission’s role being limited to surveillance. The European Parliament and the Court of Justice play virtually no part in the OMC process. The open method of coordination takes place in areas which fall within the competence of the Member States, such as employment, social protection, social inclusion, education, youth and training.
- 22.
“Co-production of social services offers new opportunities as well as challenges for collective solutions to growing problems facing the public provision of social services in Europe. It gives citizens both more choice and more voice, as well as a more active role in the provision of public services. But, greater citizen participation and more third sector provision of social services can meet with resistance both from traditional public administration and New Public Management (NPM), each based on a separate logic. However, New Public Governance (NPG) is based on network governance and relies on greater citizen participation, co-production, and more third sector provision of public financed social services.” (Pestoff 2015).
- 23.
Fløysand and Jakobsen (2011) argue that recent contributions within the system of innovation approach are marked by an instrumentalism that views innovation as a predictable and standardised process that in most aspects counters theories and empirical observations stressing the multilevel, spontaneous, and complex features of innovation. Informed by the relational turn within economic geography these scholars develop an alternative analytical framework. They do this stepwise: first, by elaborating on how innovation was originally defined within the systems of innovation approach; second, by outlining a relational based analytical framework based on the concept of social fields; and, finally, by demonstrating how it has been applied.
- 24.
Schrank and Whitford (2011) have shown that network failures are not due to the simple absence of network governance, but rather to a situation in which transactional conditions for network desirability obtain but network governance is impeded either by ignorance or opportunism, or by a combination of the two. Network failures are depicted as continuous rather than discrete outcomes. They have more than one cause. Two undertheorised – if not undiscovered – types of network failure (i.e., involution and contested collaboration) are analysed.
- 25.
Every social network has a ‘relational pattern’. We could think of any organisational or associative form describable as a network that is inspired by a certain relational modality among participants: a company can be hierarchical or not, a voluntary association or a rehabilitation community for drug addicts identifies with (and uses) a certain relational pattern of help, a cooperative has a relational pattern among members, a sport or cultural association contemplates a certain modality by which the members relate to one another, a network of families think about their relations as ‘family’ relations, a social network on the internet comes into being from a relation-type among people who communicate, etc.
- 26.
For example, in his essay On Being Morally Considerable, the American ethical philosopher Kenneth E. Goodpaster (1978) maintains that any distinction between organisms thought to be in some way “worthy” of moral consideration and others that are not is clearly a case of discrimination.
- 27.
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Donati, P. (2016). The Relational Understanding of the Origin and Morphogenetic Change of Social Morality. In: Archer, M. (eds) Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity . Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28439-2_10
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